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Karl Schmückle and Western Marxism

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Karl Schmückle and Western Marxism Revolutionary Russia ISSN: 0954-6545 (Print) 1743-7873 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/frvr20 Karl Schmückle and Western Marxism Kaan Kangal To cite this article: Kaan Kangal (2018) Karl Schmückle and Western Marxism, Revolutionary Russia, 31:1, 67-85, DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2018.1478671 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2018.1478671 Published online: 18 Jun 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 48 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=frvr20 Revolutionary Russia, 2018 Vol. 31, No. 1, 67–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2018.1478671 Kaan Kangal KARL SCHMÜCKLE AND WESTERN MARXISM Born in 1898 in South-West Germany, the son of a lumberjack, a student of Karl Korsch in Jena, a colleague of Georg Lukács in Moscow, a militant of the Communist Part of Germany (KPD), and later a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB), Schmückle was a prominent Marx expert, a literary critic and an editor of the first Marx- Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA1). This article examines whether Schmückle can be called a Western Marxist. To this end, it first investigates the theoretic, geological and social patterns of Western Marxism and then detects similarities and differences between Schmückle and some pioneering figures of Western Marxism. My main contention is that Western Marxist historio- graphypotentiallyexcludesmuchofwhatstandsandfallswithSchmückle’s intellectual bio- graphy and political identity. The way Western Marxism would read Schmückle leads to the conclusion that Schmückle was a Westerner and a Marxist, but hardly a Western Marxist. This suggests that either Western Marxism applies to him in a very loose sense or, alternatively, the term can be empirically falsified in Schmückle’s case. How social histories are narrated depends on which concepts are employed and for what purpose. ‘Western Marxism’ is such a concept and is employed to map particular pio- neering figures in particular periods of time in particular places, but also to critically situate Western Marxism in the theoretical framework that it creates and to which it belongs. Curiously enough, Western Marxism is a negative term. It is something that is not ‘Soviet Marxism.’ In contradistinction to whatever is called ‘Soviet’ or Soviet Marxism in terms of political economy, ideology, philosophy or literature, Western Marxism rather is a protest against, or a critical attitude towards the ways in which the history of Marxism has developed. It is a reclamation of its own place. Western Marxism then is something more, or other, than a mere category of social historiography. Its ambitions go far beyond the standard tasks of any historical narrative: it attempts to reshape the narrative of the history of Marxism itself. This ambition to become a genuine subject and object of its own historical narrative has a certain novelty. But how different is this from what it desperately tries to dis- tinguish itself from – Soviet Marxism? Much of what is, or can be, said of Western Marxism with respect to its narrative ambitions also applies to its Soviet counterpart. They share a pattern in this regard. Is this because there actually is no clear-cut line between Western and Soviet Marxisms? The problem may have been misplaced from the very beginning, for it seemingly arises from an East–West binary. This binary is blurry because it requires further definitions of ‘East,’‘West’ and, of course, ‘Marxism.’ However, these terms are usually ill-defined, even though they have been employed for a long time and widely circulated by many historians of Marxism. R 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 68 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA Thus, we are told that these are the concepts to begin with if we are to attempt to grasp the motivating forces within the history of Marxism. Western Marxism is not, and never claimed to be, immune to critique. Quite the contrary, it presupposes an examination of its own tools. Following this lead, the present article sees its task, perhaps paradoxically, in questioning whether and to what extent the very term Western Marxism applies to a group of German scholars of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Soviet Union, but more closely to one particular figure from that group: Karl Schmückle.1 Born in 1898 in south-western Germany, Schmückle was the son of a lumberjack, a student of Karl Korsch in Jena, a colleague of Georg Lukács in Moscow, a militant of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later a member of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKP(B)). He was a prominent Marxologist, a historian of European social utopias, a literary critic and novelist, and an editor of the first Marx-Engels-Gesam- tausgabe (MEGA1).2 Schmückle was politicized during the First World War, then joined the KPD and worked in different communist papers such as Rote Fahne and Die Interna- tionale. He was also one of the participants of the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche, a 1923 seminar organized by Felix Weil, the co-founder of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Aware of Schmückle’s many talents, Weil recommended him to the Marx– Engels Institute in Moscow when David Riazanov, the director of the Institute, was looking for German editors to work on his MEGA1 project. Schmückle worked at the Moscow Institute until Riazanov was charged with Menshevik conspiracy. The Insti- tute was shut down in 1931, and Schmückle, along with many others, was dismissed. Until his arrest in 1937 for Trotskyist espionage, and execution in 1938, Schmückle con- tributed to certain Soviet-based German papers such as Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung and Internationale Literatur.3 Did Schmückle fit into the category of Western Marxism? I would argue that the way Western Marxism is identified and the biographical, geographical and theoretical patterns it provides run into controversy when it comes to Schmückle. The central issue in identifying Western Marxism has consisted thus far in detecting the figures who are either originally from, and reside in, or emigrated to the West. Therefore Marxists moving in opposite directions, from West to East, comprise something of a blind spot in this narrative. Moreover, what scholarly contributions they made in the Soviet Union, and how their achievements were echoed in the West, is out of the scope of Western Marxist historiography. One of the significant, and controversial, examples is perhaps the scholarly edition of Marx and Engels’ works that caused a massive change in the ways Marx and Engels were read and interpreted in the East and West. Nevertheless, in Schmückle’s case there are some other aspects that need to be taken into account. One of the core elements of Western Marxism is its alleged scientific-theoretical system or a world outlook open to non-Marxist sources. I will show that this perfectly applies to Schmückle’s works on European intellectual history and literary criticism, which he wrote before and after he emigrated to Soviet Union, and even after he was dismissed from the Marx-Engels Institute. In this article, I will first focus on how the term Western Marxism was coined and examine to what extent it applies to Schmückle. I will then go into some of Schmückle’s own writings in order to portray a type of intellectual in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s. Some additional remarks on his trial and execution will also be helpful to understand the factual circumstances and the physical environment that might underlie KARL SCHMÜCKLE AND WESTERN MARXISM 69 his absence in the historiographies of Marxism. This study certainly challenges the Western Marxist narrative. My intention here, however, is not to bury the eponyms of Western Marxism but to use its ambivalences in a productive way. One might call this approach a fruitful paradox. What is Western Marxism? Western Marxism is commonly considered an intellectual current of ‘Marxists who were politically independent of the Soviet Union.’ Accordingly, they were ‘not con- forming to the official Soviet ideology,’ and ‘not regarding the social structures of the Soviet Union either as socialist, or as developing towards socialism.’‘Marxists,’ on the other hand, are those whose main intellectual focus consists of ‘economic and social forces’ of history, that is a ‘specific series of successive social formations’ based on a dialectical dynamic of class struggle.4 Furthermore, some biographical, geographic and theoretic traits are used in order to demarcate ‘Western Marxism’ as an integrated tradition. Almost all of the Western Marxists had a middle-class background and were radica- lized during the First World War. They were either natives or emigrants of Western Europe. Theoretically, they represented a ‘structural divorce’ from ‘political practice.’ Unlike the ‘Classical Marxism’ before the First World War that typically performed an inseparable political-intellectual function in political parties in Eastern and Western Europe, Western Marxism experienced a rupture between theory and praxis in a genera- tional context after the First World War.5 A theoretical shift from politics and economy to philosophy, culture and literature is ascribed to Western Marxists in order to distinguish them from their Soviet counterpart. The first receptions of and massive reactions to the newly published early philosophical writings of Marx in 1920s and 1930s, so the argu- ment goes, played a major role in its theoretical turn.6 But more importantly, the gulf between socialist theory and working-class practice, we are told, results from an ‘insti- tutionally widened and fixed … bureaucratization of the USSR and of the Comintern under Stalin.’7 If ‘Soviet Marxists’‘finish on top,’‘write the histories,’‘hand out the medals’ and had glorious victories on the stage of history, then ‘Western Marxists’ are those who are ‘silenced and defeated.’8 ‘The success of Soviet Marxism contributed to, and often directed, the defeat of other Marxisms.’9 Whether a dissident leftism of this sort can be called Marxism is not my topic here.10 I am, rather, interested in the patterns that this narrative provides.
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